Ban on, sale of extracted coal allowed

***Among those who had thronged the Meghalaya high court premises during the NGT hearing was Sutnga legislator Justin Dkhar on Monday.Pix by WT Lytan***

SHILLONG, JUNE 9: The National Green Tribunal (NGT) stuck to its earlier ruling to ban rat-hole coal mining but gave a partial relieve to the coal mine owners by allowing them to transport the already extracted coal that was lying in the different coal mines of the state after the NGT ban.

The decision to continue the rat hole coal mining ban was taken during hearing of the NGT special circuit bench of Eastern Zone held at the Meghalaya high court and chaired by justice Swatanter Kumar and expert member Ranjan Chaterjee on Friday.

Friday’s order continuing the ban came much to the chagrin of the coal lobby that had come in large number for the NGT hearing. Now they are pinning their hopes on the next August 1 hearing

Till the August 1 hearing of the NGT, both the state government and the coal miners have been give an opportunity to work out in having a comprehensive mechanism to deter environmental degradation because of coal mining.

What came as a relieve to the coal miners in the state and those who had come from neighbouring state Assam is that the NGT allowed the transportation and selling of the already extracted coal that had been lying in the State.

But before that a six-member committee would be formed to prepare the inventory of the extracted coal. The committee would submit its report to the NGT within a week.

The royalty recovered from this extracted coal would be distributed between the district council and the government and this amount would be spent on land reclamation scheme.

The NGT put an interim ban on rat-hole coal mining in Meghalaya after the Assam-based All Dimasa Student’s Union and Dima Hasao District Committee filed a petition before it, stating that the acidic discharge from unscientific coal mines of Meghalaya was polluting the Kopili River downstream.

In another case of the 15 miners that had been reported missing from 2012 in a coal mine accident in South Garo hills district, the NGT has ordered that witnesses should be produced during the August 1 hearing.

The NGT was not convinced with the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) report that nobody had been found inside the mine. In the next hearing there would be cross-examination of all the parties involved in the case.-By Our Reporter